Prof Frances Bowen, Pro-Vice Chancellor for Social Sciences, joined UEA on 1 September 2018. She is responsible for the overall academic and strategic leadership of the seven schools within UEA’s Social Sciences faculty, and leads on several cross-university portfolios.

Before joining UEA, Prof Bowen was Dean of the School of Business and Management at Queen Mary University of London, where she had also previously served as Deputy Head and Director of Research. Having earned degrees at the University of Oxford, Northeastern University (USA), and the University of Bath, she went on to progressively more senior academic appointments at the University of Sheffield and the University of Calgary in Canada, where she was Associate Dean (Research) at the Haskayne School of Business. She has also held visiting fellowships at the University of Oxford and at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.

Prof Bowen’s research focuses on corporate environmental strategy and has been supported by nearly £1m of grant funding from the ESRC, EPSRC, BEIS, Defra, SSHRC and Canadian provincial and federal governments. She is a Professor of Strategy in Society at Norwich Business School, where her research focuses on responsible business and regulatory alternatives. She has served as both the Chair of the Organizations and the Natural Environment (ONE) Division of the Academy of Management, and as President of the Group for Research on Organizations and the Natural Environment (GRONEN).

Since holding an ESRC-funded knowledge exchange fellowship at Defra in 2013, Prof Bowen often gives advice and evidence to regulators (e.g. the Environment Agency) and government departments (e.g. Defra; NAO; BEIS) on how to influence corporate environmental behaviours. She is currently on the BEIS Network of Experts, advising policy leads on regulatory alternatives.